Why go out to the movie theater when Sony allows you to get the same experience at home for free?

Sony may have a new movie release strategy for its online distribution platform, the PlayStation Store. Normally, a movie won't go up on the store as a digital download until after it's out of theaters, and consumers can pay to rent or purchase it. The newer strategy may be to release movies for free while they're still trying to earn a buck in the theater, as it mistakenly did with crime thriller Armored last week.

According to reports, Armored was available to download for around five hours on the PlayStation store, and it didn't cost a single red cent. The movie, which tells the tale of an armored car robbery gone wrong, is not up on the service anymore, so those of us late to the party will just have to suffer. Despite the star power of Laurence Fishburne and Matt Dillon, Armored wasn't received too well by critics, with 50% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. Free is free though, no matter how much someone may try to tell you otherwise, and I'm sure a gaggle of people now own it courtesy of Sony's mistake.

This type of situation was unheard of back in the old days, with physical copies of movies not arriving in stores until long after their theatrical releases. The wait for Back to the Future to hit VHS was almost painful. Now things have changed, with movies able to be magically beamed into our homes possibly even before they hit the big screen. Though it would cripple the movie theater as we know it, I wouldn't be surprised if someday movies are released in the same manner that Sony has done here with Armored. It'll just remember to charge for them next time.